Challenges Getting Started with Gaia

Oct 3, 2012

This past week, a few members of Firefox team were asked to help out with the big pile of bugs blocking the initial release of Gaia, the Boot to Gecko user interface. I’m no stranger to jumping into a new project, so I figured this would be a fun opportunity to do something different for a few months. I ran into some problems getting my Gaia development environment set up, and I wanted to document them in an effort to improve the experience for other new contributors.

This being Mozilla, the first thing I did was find the wiki page about getting a build environment set up. I don’t have a B2G device yet, so I was looking to set up a desktop development environment. The “quick start” instructions said that I just needed to clone Gaia from github, and then I could run it in a desktop Firefox nightly build. Sounds simple!

However, when I tried doing that, I ended up with an empty home screen.

I saw that the wiki also mentioned I could download a desktop B2G build, so I tried that next.

/path/to/b2g -profile `pwd`/profile

I still ended up with the same blank home screen. On IRC, I heard ttaubert say he was using his own B2G desktop build, built from mozilla-central. Since I already had a mozilla-central development environment set up, building B2G was as easy as creating a new mozconfig.

And that worked! Time to start hacking. I looked through the list of “mentored” github issues, and I found an simple-looking bug in the browser app. The first thing I wanted to do was add some logging in a file. To enable console logging, I heard on IRC that I needed to be running DEBUG=1 make in my gaia directory, not just plain make. I made that change, but this time when I launched my B2G desktop app, I got a completely blank white screen!

There were no error messages in my terminal window, but I learned that I could use the -jsconsole flag to open the JavaScript console. When I did that, I saw some errors in core B2G code.

No one on IRC in #gaia was able to help me figure out this issue, and I was feeling pretty frustrated. I ended up talking to a B2G developer in the office, and he said that Gaia’s debug mode is often unstable. He suggested that instead of running Gaia in debug mode, I should make a debug B2G build and use dump statements for my print-based debugging. Following this suggestion, I finally ended up in a place to try to start making a patch. However, the instructions for running Gaia’s unit tests say you should be using debug mode, so I don’t know if this is a real long-term solution.

I haven’t finished my patch yet, so I may run into more issues along the way, but I want to encourage developers to update documentation regularly, and to make sure that documentation works. I’m employed by Mozilla, so I’m required to have the patience to sort through issues like these, but they can be a real hurdle for volunteer contributors to get involved in the project. Let’s try to fix that!